Peering over the mummified body of Isabella Lopez, he saw Ulrich appear on the steps. He lowered his head and waited.
“Holy shit,” Ulrich said, “his hidden harem, just like the crazy bastard said, all wrapped tight as Tootsie Rolls.”
| 83 |
Ulrich stood about five feet ten. The topmost catafalque was perhaps a foot above his head.
He must have decided at a glance that David wouldn’t be found here. Besides, the collection of hidden pretties astonished him and perhaps excited him, not necessarily because he would ever do what Jessup had done with these bodies, but because it appealed to his lust for power. According to Ronny Jessup’s twisted way of thinking, for a portion of these women’s lives, he owned them, and by this act of preservation and storage, he felt that he owned them in death, too, even if they couldn’t be called back to life and used. Drawn by admiration for the work of his imprisoned idol, perhaps thrilled to be about to ascend the throne of this underworld and soon begin his vicious rule with a living girl upstairs, Ulrich came off the stairs and into the crypt.
The man was barefoot. David could judge his position only by sound. Fortunately Ulrich muttered his amazement and admiration as he moved past the first wall of catafalques. Trusting his ear, David shoved the mummified body off the platform.
Ulrich cried out as the corpse fell upon him. He staggered back into the table of jewelry and personal effects, and fell.
David slid off the shelf and dropped to the floor, knife in hand, as Ulrich thrashed to get out from under the wrapped cadaver.
The pistol had been knocked from his hand. He scrambled after it, seized it, rolled onto his back, and squeezed off a shot that missed David’s head by the width of grace.
Even as the muzzle flared, David slashed, and light glistened liquidly along the arcing blade, which sliced the wrist of his adversary’s gun hand.
Ulrich’s scream was as shrill as a hog’s bleat. No less high on adrenaline than his attacker, he squeezed off another round. But the pistol wobbled in his weakened hand, and the shot went well wide of its target. David fell on him, all his strength and weight behind the knife, driving the big blade into the other’s chest, cracking ribs and cleaving the dark heart that clutched around the steel.
The milky light of the sconces painted cataracts on Ulrich’s gray eyes. His scoop of a jaw hung open, as if he meant to shout in terror at something he had seen just as the life was cut out of him, something beyond his assailant.
David withdrew the knife from the dead man.
The only significant blood was from the slashed wrist. Because the heart stopped instantly, the chest wound produced only a small dark stain.
A small dark stain and stillness. The stillness of the dead man affected David as might have the violent pitching and yawing of a ship in a storm, for he had been the agent of this solemn fixity.
After the wave of nausea passed, he picked up Ulrich’s pistol. An ammo pouch hung from the dead man’s belt; David extracted a spare magazine from it. He ejected the partially depleted magazine from the weapon and replaced it with the fully loaded spare. A quick search of Ulrich’s pockets turned up a small ring of keys in addition to an electronic key for a vehicle.
He got to his feet.
With his shirt sleeve, he blotted the sweat from his eyes.
He was shaking, though not as badly as he’d been earlier.
From the items on the table, those few belongings of the lost women, he took a folded midnight-blue silk scarf with a pattern of silver stars.
He ascended the stairs to the upper crypt. He climbed the step stool and used the scarf to wipe his prints from the ceramic tile with the never-blinking blue eye.
He folded the stepladder and put it in the passageway outside the door. He inserted all the flashlights and the two bricks of plastic explosive into the backpack and set it beside the ladder. He untied the leather sheaths from his belt and put the knife in the backpack, and then the pistol, as well.
He went a short distance through the maze to the cell that Ulrich had prepared for whatever girl he had intended to capture.
No mirror hung above the white pedestal sink. He was grateful for that.
He washed the blood from his hands and dried them and used the towel to wipe the faucets and, on leaving, the knob on the cell door.
In the passageway, he looked left, right, half expecting Ronny Lee Jessup to lunge at him, which sometimes happened in his dreams.
A rushing sound. Like a flight of dark birds, an enormous flock. But it wasn’t birds at all, only the susurration of his own blood eerily audible to him, his life in circulation through his arteries and veins.